Reham will soon be presenting her PhD research seminar. All are welcome to attend. Details are as follows:
School of Computer Science Seminar
June 12, 2019 @ 1:30pm
Gradually decaying content protects social media users’ privacy
Speaker: Reham Mohamed
Location: 5345 Herzberg Laboratories
ABSTRACT
Decaying representations can be used on social media profiles to gradually decay older content, and help users disassociate from past online activities. We showed managers fictitious social media profiles for job candidates. We explore whether the use of decaying representations influence managers’ opinion of job candidates and impact their hiring decisions, compared to seeing a full profile or an empty profile with no posts. We further examine whether the gender of the profile owner or managers’ demographics impacts these decisions. We report on results from a 2 X 3 between-subjects study with 360 managers. We show that decayed profiles or empty profiles led to more positive hiring decisions than profiles in their original format. However, decayed profiles also contributed to overall more positive impressions of the candidates. We found no significant effect of candidate gender. Managers’ gender or age had a limited impact on their decisions. We also found that our managers regularly search social media before making hiring decisions in real life, suggesting that decaying representations could be important to reputation management. Based on our results, we present implications for individual privacy and online social media.